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Club Kid

In the late 1990s, when Chad Cortez
Everett was a graduate student at the Hoffberger School of Painting,
a division of the Maryland Institute College of Art, he went out one
night in Baltimore with his school colleagues.

Everett enjoyed the clubs. He went
there for inspiration, for ideas, for subjects. He was becoming known
around school as the Baltimore Club Painter, and although it was a
tag he didn't mind – the work he was creating was getting him
noticed – he felt the hard and raw pull coming from somewhere in
his mind that said that his art needed to be about more than just
pretty paintings.

On this particular night in Baltimore,
an Asian man approached him. He asked Everett if he could sing.
Everett replied that he was not a good singer. The Asian man then
asked him, 'Can you dance?' Everett replied that he could dance, but
not well. Then the Asian man asked him, 'Do you rap?' Everett said
that no, he did not rap.

“Well, then you must not be black,”
the Asian man told Everett, “because all of the black people I run
across do all of that.”

Privately seething, Everett then asked
the Asian man whether he knew karate. The Asian man said that he did
not, and called Everett a racist. “I told him, 'Well, what did you
just ask me?'” Everett said.

Everything crystallized in his head
when Everett returned to his apartment. Everything about how we
assess people, he thought, is wrong, he thought. He hated the way we
look at people who wear baggy jeans and are all tatted up from head
to toe must be a criminal, just like how we believe that all people
who wear a Confederate flag patch on their sleeves belong to some
backwoods militia hellbent on promoting the Aryan race.

Artist Chad Cortez Everett outside his Landenberg home.

And there it was. “You Don't Know My
Name,” where the hollow face of an African-American man seems to
burst from the canvas and behind the image, a prism of infinity,
stairways going everywhere, headed to new journeys and new places. Then Everett took out his paints, sat
near a blank canvas, and waited. He listened until his rage quieted
down to a sweet stillness, and he continued to wait until his
thoughts were crystallized and hard as sandstone. Then he took the
tip of his brush, dipped it into paint, and then onto the canvas.

“I thought at the time that we need
to get to the point where instead of just looking at the outside of
someone, we need to step into their minds,” Everett said.
“Ignorance is bliss. Sometimes getting to know someone is harder
than just passing judgment.”

nearly two decades removed from that
night in Baltimore, “Face” is now displayed in the family room of
the Landenberg home Everett shares with his wife and young daughter.

“Who is Chad Cortez
Everett?”

In 2002, Everett, who in addition to
receiving a Master's from Hoffberger had previously studied painting
at the Tyler School of Art in Philadelphia, produced a solo
exhibition of his work at the Christina Cultural Arts Center in
Wilmington. He called the show “Who is Chad Cortez Everett?”

In a career that has taken him to 14
solo exhibitions and 18 group shows from Philadelphia to Wilmington
and seemingly a dozen towns in between, it's a question Everett has
been attempting to answer on his own ever since.

Everything you need to know about Chad
Cortez Everett begins with his hunger. It manifests itself in a
self-driven motivation to perfect what happens when he applies a
paintbrush to a canvas. It began when he was a little boy, when he
was just another kid running around the Bartram Village Projects in
Philadelphia. He was not the best athlete there, but his cousin was
one of the cool kids in his neighborhood, and it wasn't because he
could toss a footbal a mile or slam dunk on a basketball court. It
was because he could draw. Everett asked his cousin to teach him to
draw and soon, with the fundamentals of illustration now in his kit
bag, drawing was soon his obsession. His cousin used to look at
Everett's drawings, and one day, he told him, "You've got to go
to Overbrook's art school."

Leslie Kamison, Everett's art teacher
at Overbrook High School's art magnet program, was a former Marine,
and he drove the students in a military-like tutorial of discipline.
In class one day, he told the young Everett, "I need you to
commit to me."

"Mr. Kamison used to say to us,
'If I'm going to teach you guys to paint or draw, I need to know that
what you reate is coming from your heart,'" Everett said. "He
told us that if it was not my from the heart, then we're just playing
around. He taught us that it has to be soulful art, which comes from
the soul. I've always carried that with me.

"He taught us that we all have a
voice. Some people may understand that voice, some don't, but it's
the voice that makes us different from other artists. If we all
painted the same way, I have a funny feeling that art would be too
predictable."

"Can you show me
something I have not already seen?"

In 2013, the Vivant Art Collection in
Philadelphia presented a solo exhibition of Cortz' work. "Human:
Trials, Transformation, Triumph -- Believe the Hype, A Story of
Enlightenment" was a 24-piece tribute to everything that Kamison
taught Everett back at Overbrook. His sould burst from the canvases.
His voice told a narrative that reflected society, identity, mental
illness, and introduced the audience to the message of what the
artist was trying to convey -- to heal and transform.

"I tell other artists all the
time, 'You have to be honest with your viewers about the stories
you're telling as an artist,'" Everett said. "Nowadays,
when I look at the modern art scene, I feel like a lot of artists are
not being truthful toward their audience. They're trendy artists.
They just go with what's going on at the moment. They paint it and
abandon it.

"You have to expereince these life
moments in order to paint. You have to do a lot of soul searching
before you produce a painting. You have to release it down and ask
yourelf a lot of questions. Some artists don't want to accept the
truth about their work. Sometimes their messages fall short because
they don't take it to a more intellectual level. They tend to play it
safe and remain in the box that has been built for them."

There is, arguably, not an artist of
color in the United States who has not thought about applying his or
her reflections on the issue of Race in America onto a white space or
a garage wall. In light of Ferguson, of Staten Island, of Baltimore,
their numbers are many and their leap has been ferocious. It's not a
topic that sprang up overnight; Everett began pouring his emotions on
the topic years ago, but instead of painting images that depict
violence, he goes softer in his narrative. Rather thn guns, for
instance, "Happy People" and "Change is Coming"
portray African-Americans with outstretched arms, paintings that
reflect the quiet steps of Hope rather than the gun-toting fist of
Despair.

"It's all a duplication of
effort," Everett said of the art world's response to race. "If
you want to do this kind of work, please come up with solutions,
because otherwise, you're just adding gasoline to the fire. Can you
show me something that I have not already seen?

"Too many black artists are on
this subject simply because it's a hot issue," he added. "I
try to dig in as deep as I can because I want my viewers to
understand that the angles I'm coming from are personal images, but
at the same time are universal that they can relate to. That's the
narrative, to tell the story about what's going on in the artist's
mind. That's the formula that separates the artist from the rest of
the pack."

Light Tower

Since 2007, Everett has been an art
techer at the McCullough Middle School in New Castle, De., where he
teaches visual arts and art history to students from the sixth grade
to the eighth grade. In more ways than he can count, the students he
teaches at McCullough are different than those -- like him -- who
attended Kamison's art classes at Overbrook. When he was a id,
Everett had the love of his mother and his grandparents to see him
out of Bartram Village and into college, but every year at
McCullough, he can count on more than one hand those who come to
school not having had breakfast that morning, or from splintered
family factions that are not focused on learning but with mere
survival. They arrive at school loaded not with books but with
burdens and barriers, both real and invented, and Everett knows that
being able to express themselves through art is the furthest thing
from thier minds.

"These students have been told
over the years that they can't draw, but I tell them that if they
have the desire to do it, and even if they don't have artistic
skills, they can still apply some of these principles in every day
life, in terms of overcoming odds," Everett said. "They
have been taught that if they fall down, stay down. I tell them that
if they fall down to get back up. I tell them that the race is not
over, nd that they may have 80 more years on this planet."

In order to reach these students,
Everett funnels his lessons through the prism of pop culture
relevance: music, celebrity...and footwear. Recently, he supervised a
project that gave his students the creativity to design their own
sneakers.

"You have to make a connection in
the classroom," he said. "I might be the only light tower
in the their lives, so I want to plant that seed of inspiration in
their mind."

Promised Land

Chad Cortez Everett's avatar – his
incarnation, his embodiment – is in the form of a man sitting in a
chair. There it is, in his painting “Second Chance,” a figure of
a man in the painting who is attached to a chair. He's also in
"Running From the Truth," and "Capoeria," and
"Knowledge as Power."

"I am the man in the chair, and
the fact that it's attached represents immobility," Everett
said. "You go through roller coasters as an artist, and at that
time, the art world was not accepting my work. When I left
Hoffberger, I thought I'd be a rock star artist coming out of art
school. It didn't work out that way, and in many ways, even though
I've contnued to pursue my art on my own terms, it's still an upward
climb."

At 41, Everett realizes that he is no
longer the Club Kid artist soaking up the nightlife scene in
Baltimore as a care-free art student top heavy with talent and
desire. He sees the transient choices made by contemporary artists in
an effort to shock the public rather than ask them to ruminate. He
struggles with the big weight of aspiration versus obligation, the
common thorn shared by ninety-nine point nine percent of creative
people in America. He begins a new painting and questions whether its
intended meaning will strike the right chords. He attends solo or
group exhibitions of his work and watches the faces of the people who
stop to look at his paintings. 'Am I reaching them?' he thinks. 'Is
it the story they want from art -- the message -- or is it merely for
the colors?'

Before he heads off to McCullough
Middle School, Everett wakes up at 4:30 a.m. most mornings and enters
a very small room on the lower floor of his home. He calls it his
studio, but it really isn't one in the traditional definition of the
word. It's made for function only; there are utility objects and
inner guts of the home protrude down from the ceiling. There are no
windows that overlook a meadow or a lake -- like the way we uually
think of artist's studios -- and therefore, there is no natural
light. The painting he is currently working on is at eye level in
front of him, unceremoniously fastened to the far wall in the small
room.

"I picked it because I'm isolated
there, and it is my separate world from my real world," he said.
"My wife has tried to get me to get my own studio away from the
house. I tell her that it wouldn't be the same, that I would waste
time. If I wake up in the middle of the night, I can come right here
and work. This way, I'm focused, with less distractions that may
interfere with my feelings and my thoughts."

And so the man in the chair continues
to work, and what comes out of that litle room -- Chad Cortz
Everett's artistic narrative -- screams sometimes, and other times it
hums, whispers or prays.

"That's just the way life is,"
he said. "There's all different kinds of emotions that enter in
and out of your life. You express all of it by finding your vehicle,
and you drive it to your desired location. Once that vehicle breaks
down, you have to get another vehicle, because where you're trying to
get to is the promised land."